The Trouble with Destiny
by Masquerading as Quality
Summary: "But how could I marry a prince? I'd have to be-" - "A princess." - "And you are, dear." - "The Princess Aurora." Briar Rose's aunts do not make jokes. If they are telling her that her entire life has been a lie, they are not joking. Response to a prompt from harpyvixen. Canon-compliant.
1. A Cruel Joke

**A/N:** Response to a prompt from harpyvixen:

"What is going through Rose's mind after her "Aunts" break the news to her? And all the way up to the moment when Maleficent appears in the fireplace to lure her to the tower."

Canon-compliant, and some dialogue was borrowed from the movie. Fairly dark, but no specific warnings. Feedback would be much appreciated!

* * *

Briar Rose's aunts have always been very serious people. It isn't that they don't smile or laugh—they do, all the time! Rose's childhood has been filled with warmth and happiness. But every so often Rose says something, just a passing comment, a little joke…

"Rose, dear, would you go out and pick some flowers?" Aunt Flora would say.

"Flowers? But I just picked two bouquets yesterday!" Rose would reply. Then, with a grin, she'd add, "Afraid the frost will get them?"

Aunt Flora would always look at her as though she'd seen a ghost, then her expression would soften into one of gentle, mildly concerned vexation. "Rose, dear, it's the middle of June. There isn't going to be a frost. I wanted another bouquet for the kitchen, that's all."

Rose's smile would fall, she would respond, "Of course not. How silly of me. Be back before dusk!" and she'd make her way out into the woods where the prettiest flowers grew.

Rose's aunts, dearer than anything though they are, have absolutely no sense of humour, and Rose sometimes finds it quite lonely to be the only one enjoying herself as they stare at her as though she's grown a second head ("That's impossible, Rose. Humans can't grow extra heads. If they could, beheading would not be a practicable penalty.")

Unfortunately—and she must stress again how dearly she loves her aunts—Briar Rose has never met another person with whom to compare her strange love for non-serious remarks, aside from the people in story books, of course, and in those, it's only ever the occasional man who makes a joke that Rose funds funny. Rose has come to the tragic conclusion that she might truly be touched in the head, or at the very least, that she has an unacceptable mind for a woman. She supposes she'll never find a husband now, though admittedly her prospects were already somewhat limited by the fact that she's not allowed to speak to anyone.

Briar Rose is turning sixteen today. According to her aunts, today is the day she becomes a woman, not just a child anymore. She finds the idea somewhat frightening, given her newfound discovery about the shortcomings of her mind, but she also finds it unbearably exciting. Rose has been clinging for nearly a year now to the desperate hope that on this day, her life will change.

Rose must stress once again that she has not had a bad life, not by any definition. She does not remember her parents—they died in a fire caused by an evil fairy when she was only a few days old—but she has never known anything less than adoration from all three of her mother's sisters. They have given her everything they possibly could, and a day has never gone by in which they have not told her that they love her, that she is beautiful and kind and good, and that they only want the best life for her.

They have given her everything except for a friend…someone her own age, or someone with whom she has anything in common at all, really.

Rose hopes that today that might change. She hopes that, now that she is a woman and not a child anymore, she might be permitted to talk to someone—anyone will do! She knows that it will be marvelous to talk to someone new, whether it is the man and woman who bake bread, or the woman who mends shoes, or the woman and her son who stop by their house sometimes and knock, only to walk away when no one ever answers the door. She knows that when she is granted permission, the world will open up to her like a window, and she will suddenly see and know and understand everything which has eluded her in her sixteen years of existence.

She doesn't mean to disobey them, really she doesn't. She's never disobeyed them before, not since she learned the rules when she was five or so. But he is so handsome and so insistent and he has such a lovely singing voice, and she thinks perhaps a part of her hopes so badly that when she comes home, her aunts will tell her that it's okay, anyway, and then no harm will have been done, that she's already convinced herself that it's real and she's allowed.

And he is so persistent! She tries to get away!

But what if she grows old and her beauty fades and then nobody wants her? She's read countless stories that end that way. The men only go chasing after the girls who are young and beautiful. Women who are old and plain end up alone and unloved and very, very sad. Rose does not want to end up alone.

A part of her knows she's being melodramatic. Somewhere, deep in the recesses of her mind, she realizes that this stranger she met in the woods cannot be the only friendly, handsome boy there ever was. Yet, he is the only one she had ever laid eyes on, and indeed, he is the only man of any variety she has ever laid eyes on, and he is the only person other than her three very dearest of aunts to whom she has ever really spoken at all, and so she cannot help herself if in the course of an afternoon, he has become the center of her entire (admittedly very small) universe.

Her universe didn't have a center before. She didn't realize that until just now. She was drifting idly in no direction at all and then suddenly, just as she knew it would, her life changed when she turned sixteen, and now she has a purpose and she understands everything. Everything is him, her handsome stranger in the woods. He is the answer to everything. This must be what love feels like, and surely her aunts will understand that.

"Aunt Flora? Fauna, Merryweather?" she calls as she lets herself into the cottage in the glen. "Where is everybody? Oh!"

_Oh! _Oh, it's the most beautiful thing she's ever seen! Oh, this is the best day of her life—she cannot imagine how a day could ever, ever be any better. And oh, yes, she has had a good life, but now, now everything seems so much sweeter, now that she knows that she has a purpose and a direction and a place in this world.

"Surprise, surprise!" he aunts call as Rose examines the dress and the cake they have made for her. She can't even begin to imagine how they did it—she's always had to handle most of the sewing and cooking—but they are both—the dress and the cake—absolutely _perfect_.

"This is the happiest day of my life!" She thinks she says this out loud, but she cannot be certain, for music and birdsong and the sound of his voice and all kinds of other unintelligible things are ringing in her ears. "Everything is so wonderful!" Because of him. She is in love and she has found a friend and a love and her world has a center. "Just wait 'til you meet him!"

"Him?"

"Rose!"

"You've met some stranger?"

"Oh, he's not a stranger," she explains. He couldn't be further from, in fact. He is everything. He is a dream come true. "We've met before."

"You have?"

"Where?"

"Once upon a dream," she replies, and she is a little worried that they're going to be angry with her for breaking the rules, but this worry is drowned out by the sounds of the universe thundering in her ears, and she sings aloud the song that's foremost in her heart, or perhaps a combination of a few songs, she doesn't really know. She's never been this blissfully happy before, and she can't quite contain herself. She doesn't want to.

She reaches out to Aunt Fauna, who she knows will understand the best. More than either of her sisters, Fauna believes the very hardest in the possibility of true love.

"She's in love," says Aunt Fauna, sounding unhappy. This is when the first pang of genuine fear strikes her heart. If Fauna isn't happy for her…

"Oh no."

"This is terrible!"

"Why?" she asks, the song in her heart ending in abrupt, heavy silence. "After all, I am sixteen," she says. Today she becomes a woman, not just a child anymore. Today her life has become wonderful. How can her beloved aunts not see that?

"It isn't that, dear," says Aunt Flora sadly.

"You're already betrothed," Aunt Fauna adds.

"Betrothed?" Rose echoes, and now she hears another kind of sound, the sound of the world as she knows it crashing down around her.

"Since the day you were born," says Aunt Merryweather with a smile.

"To Prince Philip, dear," Fauna finishes, and she, too, looks happy.

Briar Rose decides that her aunts are playing a joke on her. It's a very cruel joke, but there's no other explanation for this.

"But that's impossible," Rose replies. She is trying to do what her aunts do to her when she makes a joke. She is explaining why it is preposterous. She suddenly understands how they feel, because they don't understand. This joke isn't funny to her, like her jokes aren't funny to them. She swears to herself that she'll never make another joke as long as she lives if they'll only let this one end. "How could I marry a prince? I'd have to be—"

"A princess," Aunt Merryweather finishes her sentence, still smiling as though it's the best day of her life, too.

"And you are, dear," Aunt Fauna continues.

"The Princess Aurora," Aunt Flora finishes. "Tonight, we're taking you back to your father, King Stefan."

"But…but I can't," Rose states, feeling rather stupid as she grasps onto the most practical concern that enters into her mind. She has promised to meet her stranger tonight. It would be rude not to be here. "He's coming here tonight," she tries to explain and also not to lose consciousness. "I promised to meet him."

She doesn't hear what Aunt Flora says in response. Her ears are ringing or thundering or she's gone deaf or something, and she sees spots and flashes of light everywhere. Briar Rose's aunts do not make jokes. She knows this. She has never been more certain of anything in her life. If they are telling her that she is the Princess Aurora and that she is betrothed to Prince Philip and that her entire life and everything they have told her up until now has been a lie, they are not joking.

Prince Philip is the eldest son of King Hubert of the North, which is the kingdom nearest theirs, the Kingdom of the East. Rose knows absolutely nothing else about him, except that he's betrothed to Princess Aurora.

Princess Aurora was cursed by an evil fairy when she was a baby. Briar Rose doesn't know the evil fairy's name. It wasn't written in the book and her aunts would not tell her. The evil fairy cursed Princess Aurora to die when she turned sixteen, but then Princess Aurora disappeared without a trace. She is known as the Lost Princess of the Eastern Kingdom.

Briar Rose is Princess Aurora.

_Briar Rose is Princess Aurora._

Briar Rose is not Briar Rose. She is Princess Aurora. Her aunts say it as though it's the simplest thing in the world. "You're not you. You're she," and suddenly her world, which seemed only an instant ago to have finally found its purpose, has now exploded into a million pieces. She has no world. She is not Briar Rose, because Briar Rose doesn't exist anymore. Briar Rose was just destroyed in as few as ten words. It is as though she never existed to begin with.

Rose vaguely realizes that she's crying. She's yelling nonsense words that don't form thoughts, and all she can think is that she has to get away from these three smiling faces who somehow think that this is a good thing, that Briar Rose is gone forever and that Princess Aurora is going to die today and that she, the girl they have raised for sixteen years, is slowly drifting toward the hour of her demise.

She runs to her room and slams the door, pressing her hands and face against it as though that will somehow block out the world, but of course, it isn't even enough to block out Merryweather's low, sweet voice saying, "And we thought she'd be so happy."

She doesn't remember very much after that. She isn't certain if she's awake or asleep or caught somewhere in between. She can't see anything, and all she hears is the sound of her own voice, crying about nothing and everything as the last remaining hours of a life she has never known slip through her fingers.


	2. The Best of All Possible Worlds

"Rose," Aunt Flora shakes her shoulder gently.

Briar Rose struggles to open her eyes and she finds that she has been sleeping face down. She does not feel very well-rested at all, and she is certain something must be wrong, that her Aunt Flora is waking her up in the middle of the night.

Rose pushes herself up into a sitting position and rubs at her eyes until she can see Aunt Flora's face, which is laden with melancholy determination. She also notices that the sky outside of her window is reddish-purple, like sunset.

"It's time to go, Rose," says Aunt Flora, and she thinks Flora might have said this already.

Suddenly the events of the afternoon come back to her, and she almost falls back into the bed with the force of the realization that they are true.

It was not a cruel joke. She has determined that much. Now she must also accept that it wasn't a nightmare, either.

Rose vaguely remembers pushing all of the furniture in her room in front of her bedroom door. All except the bed, that is, which she couldn't move much. She glances over toward the door to find that these things—a chair, a bookcase, and a dresser—have all been pushed neatly aside. Lying in the center of the aisle they create is the door. Did her aunts actually break down the door? That seems improbable.

Rose turns back to Aunt Flora and grasps her hands desperately. "Aunt Flora," she pleads, her voice hoarse. "I can't. I…"

"You must, child," Aunt Flora replies firmly. "It's your destiny."

"But I—Princess Aurora is supposed to die when she turns sixteen. You're not just going to let me….let me….are you?" Rose asks, feeling herself begin to tremble.

Aunt Flora looks surprised, "Of course not, dear! We…Fauna and Merryweather and I…we aren't really your mother's sisters. Your mother is Queen Leah. We're good fairies, see?" she turns around awkwardly, as Rose is still clutching her hands, and Rose sees two little fairy wings on Aunt Flora's back.

Rose squeezes her eyes closed, and she lets go of Flora's hands.

Good fairies.

How about that?

Well, it explains the door, anyway.

"We saved you from Maleficent's spell. You're going to be all right now. We're going to take you back to your parents, and you're going to be a princess. Everything will be as it should have been from the beginning."

Rose shakes her head as a mixture of strange, unidentifiable sounds begin whirring in her ears, and she can no longer hear what Flora is saying.

Flora, Fauna, and Merryweather told her all throughout her life that her parents had died in an accident and that they were her mother's sisters. She's never really felt terribly sad about it before, because she never knew her parents, and she always knew what it was to be loved and cared for. Now it strikes her as particularly horrible that her non-aunts told her such a tragic lie. Her parents are alive. Why would they tell her that they were dead?

She actually isn't certain which is worse—the realization that her aunts lied to her about the condition of her parents, or the fact that her parents, who were fully capable of taking care of her, themselves, agreed to allow someone else to raise her for the entirety of her childhood. She isn't certain she wants to go back to being their daughter.

"You're…you're the only family I've ever known," she says to Flora. "You're the only _anything_ I've ever known." But apparently they're not her family at all. They couldn't be. They're of a completely different species. Does she even have a family, if her aunts aren't her aunts and her parents don't want her?

Flora is frowning now. She's angry with Rose. Rose can't understand why. She's the one who lied. Shouldn't Rose be angry?

She isn't angry. She…she doesn't know what she is.

"—and if this is about that boy you met in the woods, Briar Rose, then you can just start forgetting you ever knew him right now, because it will not do for a betrothed princess to be lusting after some peasant boy like a hormonal teenager. Now you just get up and march right downstairs—"

Flora's words fade in and out of the other sounds in Rose's head, and even though Flora is telling her what to do, she's also pulling her out of bed and leading her down stairs, gesticulating wildly at the beautiful dress that Rose feels very guilty for suddenly hating.

It occurs to her that she also has an explanation for the cake (which still sits untouched on the kitchen table) and the dress. Her aunts…her fake aunts…have never been very good at sewing or cooking. She didn't think about it before because she was so happy, but now she realizes that they—the cake and the dress—make little sense without some kind of outside interference, and magic honestly seems more likely than asking someone for help. They've never really spoken to other people if they could avoid it. Now Rose understands this, as well.

It takes all three of Rose's non-aunts to get her into the dress and a traveling cloak, but they manage it, and then they lead her out of the cottage she has always called home. As the door shuts behind Merryweather, Rose feels the thud in her very soul. The door to her old life, to life as she has always known it, has just been closed. She is nobody now. She is not Briar Rose and she is not Aurora and she has to keep walking the path between those two lives even though she can't imagine how anything will ever matter to her ever again.

Somewhere along the way to the castle, Rose stops abruptly, clutches her stomach, doubles over, and vomits, but she hasn't had anything to eat but for a few berries much earlier, and it's mostly blood. Her aunts…the good fairies who pretended to be her aunts…stare at her in utter horror, and she is reminded of a time in her childhood when she was sick and she vomited every time she tried to eat. They weren't like this then, all silent and frozen and distant. They didn't know what to do—they tried all kinds of different things to see what would make her feel better—but they did everything they could think of.

Now, on her hands and knees in the middle of the forest staring at her own vomit as her non-aunts stand by staring at her, Rose begins to feel angry. _I am a princess now, after all_, she thinks venomously. _I must somehow know how to be a princess._

She's angry because she can't just be another person anymore. She can't be her aunts' little Rose, a living, breathing human, whose heart beats and loves and aches, who feels happy and sad and angry, and who sometimes feels so terrible because her whole world has just crumbled into dust that she's physically ill. That's gone now. And the three good fairies who have pretended to be her family are perfectly willing to accept that.

"Rose," says one of the good fairies softly—Fauna, she thinks, and for some reason, it's so much worse that Fauna has lied to her all these years. Flora believes in duty and propriety, Merryweather in destiny. Fauna believes in love and kindness, in always seeing the best in everyone and always treating even the cruelest of creatures as real people who deserve compassion. Rose can understand why Flora and Merryweather are doing this. She cannot understand Fauna.

"Rose is dead," she snarls.

"Rose, come now, get up," Flora commands.

"When I get up," Rose replies through gritted teeth, "I will not be Rose anymore. I will be Princess Aurora. Isn't that what you want?"

"Please, stop this," says Merryweather. "You'll always be our little Rose."

"But you have to get up. Your parents are waiting. Philip is waiting. The whole kingdom is waiting for you."

"No," Rose replies, leaning back so that she is on her knees. "My parents and Prince Philip and the whole kingdom are waiting for _Princess Aurora_. I cannot be two people. I can barely even be one." She feels the good fairies staring as her the way they do when she makes a joke, as though she's gone completely mad. Perhaps she has. She wonders how this can possibly seem so simple to them.

"I can't do this," she says again, her voice breaking. She looks to Fauna first, who covers her face and pretends not to be crying, then to Merryweather, who looks at her with something like pity, and then finally back to Flora, whose face is set in a frown.

"Briar Rose, you are acting like a child. You are sixteen years old. You're a grown woman. Now, you stand up right now. Stand up!"

Was it only hours ago that Rose had hoped her whole life might change today? She had hoped that she would wake up and feel different, that she would have overnight transformed into a woman, for that was the way her aunts made it seem. When she turned sixteen, she would become a woman, whatever it is that that entails.

And yet, as she obeys Flora's command, ignoring the tears streaming down her face, Rose notes that she has not changed at all. She still feels like a child. She wants her aunts to tell her that it's all right that she doesn't know what to think or how to feel. She wants them to protect her, or at the very least to tell her what to do until she can wrap her mind around this, the fact that her entire life up to this point has been a blissful lie.

But somehow, she thinks as she draws the hood of her cloak over her head and silently follows her aunts, the answer to all of Rose's questions seems simple to them. So perhaps it is simple.

Briar Rose is not Briar Rose. She is Princess Aurora.

Briar Rose's life has been destroyed. It doesn't exist anymore.

Briar Rose should never have existed. After today, she won't.

_Everything will be as it should have been from the beginning. _


	3. The Destruction of a Soul

Briar Rose isn't very good at reading. Her aunts tried to make her learn, but she didn't realize that it was important. She has always preferred to read love stories, and still more, that Aunt Fauna read love stories to her. Aunt Fauna loves love stories even more than she does.

There's the story of Cinderella, for example, the girl who works like a slave for her step-family until she is granted her greatest wish. She goes to the King's festival and she falls in love with the prince, himself. When she disappears, the prince searches everywhere for her with only her slipper as his guide.

This seems comparatively simple to Rose: Cinderella doesn't have to become a different person, and her life will undeniably be improved in her new situation. She may suffer some adjustment issues, some awkwardness, loneliness, even an inexplicable longing for her old life, but in the end, she has more than she could ever have dreamed of.

There's also Snow White, whose step-mother wants her heart in a box. The huntsman who is sent to do the deed takes pity on her and lets her go, and she hides away with seven dwarves who live in a cottage in the woods. The queen comes after her yet again in disguise, feeding her a poisoned apple which brings her near death. Her true love, a handsome prince from the next kingdom over, finds her and kisses her awake, and they live happily ever after.

But Snow White was already a princess, and the Queen had been cold to her ever since the King's death. Snow had time to mourn the loss of her family before pursuing a family of her own, and she was always going to be Queen, handsome prince or no.

Rose wonders idly as she and her non-aunt fairy guardians traverse the dark, winding corridors of King Stefan's castle…what is her story? Can it be so easily summarized? Could a famous writer, finding himself with nothing better to do, scribble down the events of her life, editing out her pain, and market them as a tale of success?

Rose can't imagine how.

As they continue to walk, Rose studies the various closed doors and half-open windows and entertains the idea of escaping. Her aunts have magic, certainly, but her legs are at least twice as long. She could get away. But then where would she go? Back to the cottage? That would be stupid. She would have to leave the kingdom, and there is still the matter of the unidentified evil fairy who wants her to die today.

Having ruled out her foolhardy escape plans, Rose wonders how she has been so fortunate as to have avoided a run-in with this all-powerful, all-knowing evil sprite. She doesn't know much about how magic works, but she imagines that if a magical creature came across someone who was pretending to be somebody else, living under a different name wouldn't make much difference.

She is reminded of an evening several years ago when a small group of frightening creatures came knocking at the door asking if there were any babies in the house. Her aunts made her hide upstairs, but she watched from her window until they went away. She wonders now if they were looking for her, if they simply didn't realize that she wasn't a baby anymore by then.

She shivers at the thought.

Rose is stricken by the twisted idea that she has been lucky to have lived such a happy, carefree life up until now. She doesn't know anything about this particular evil fairy, but the ones in stories can be quite cruel. If an evil fairy wanted someone to die at the age of sixteen, for example, there would be nothing stopping her from torturing that person every moment of every day until such a time arrived as she became bored and granted her prisoner the death for which he had come to yearn.

If someone had discovered Rose, nothing could have saved her from such a fate. Her fairy guardians have until this day lived without their magic in an attempt to hide her, but how much good would that have done if someone had found her, anyway? She and her non-aunts would have been completely defenseless.

Rose shivers again, and she draws her cloak closer around her shoulders even though she isn't really cold.

"Bolt the door, Merryweather!" she vaguely hears Flora order as they enter yet another dark, empty, quiet room. "Fauna—pull the drapes!"

Well, she supposes this room has furniture in it—a bed, a rug, a vanity… _Oh_.

"And now, dear, if you'll just sit here," says Flora, leading her to the stool in front of the mirror.

The person staring back at Briar Rose in the mirror is at the same time undeniably her reflection and a complete stranger. She sees her facial features: her violet-blue eyes and her nose are red and swollen, her cheeks are blotchy, her hair is a mess, and there is still dried spit around her mouth. But Briar Rose has never worn such a beautiful dress—it's a dress fit for a princess, and somehow it changes her entire appearance.

Her non-aunts begin to fix her up—brushing her hair, washing and powdering her face—and she wants to swat their hands away, but she doesn't. Instead she sits there still and quiet and slowly loses sight of the things about her reflection she recognizes. The only remaining sign that Briar Rose is even alive anymore is the small flicker of panic in Princess Aurora's eyes.

"This one last gift, dear child, for thee,  
A symbol of thy royalty:  
A crown to wear in grace and beauty,  
As is thy right and royal duty."

It's the crown that does it. Rose buries her face in her arms. She can no longer bear to look at the she who is not, and her head under the weight of the crown has become too heavy to hold upright. Her body convulses painfully with dry sobs.

"Now, dear," says Fauna. _How could you do this?_

"Come," Flora chides, "let her have a few moments alone."

Briar Rose doesn't need more time alone. There has never been a day in her life when she hasn't felt lonely, when she hasn't felt that to speak to one other person in the entire world would be all her soul could ever require to be happy. Briar Rose needs her non-aunt good fairies to be her aunts again, the women who raised her, who were her family. She needs them to comfort her, even if they can't understand why she's upset, to listen even if there's nothing they can do.

"It's that boy she met," says Merryweather out in the hallway, and Rose is too tired to feel anger. She supposes that part of her has died already.

"Whatever are we going to do?" Fauna asks tearfully.

_Come back in here,_ thinks Rose. _Comfort me. Stay with me while the Briar Rose inside of me dies. No one should die alone._

"Bad day?" asks a voice, and Rose suddenly feels a wave of calmness flowing through her. The voice is unfamiliar to her, and yet, like many things Rose has experienced today, somehow familiar at the same time. Rose thinks she hears singing or some kind of distant music, too, but she cannot be certain. Perhaps she truly is dying.

"Who's there?" she asks in return, and she wants to feel frightened, but she finds as she feared that nothing matters very much to her anymore. Any enemy of hers right now can only be her friend. The only happy ending Rose can see for herself is a swift and permanent one.

"Follow me," says the voice. "I shall take you away from this place." Rose finds the voice oddly soothing. It strikes her as odd that the voice seems to be emanating from an eerie green light floating in the distance, but she doesn't give it too much thought.

"Who are you?" asks Rose as she follows the voice up a winding staircase.

"By your estimation, a friend," the voice replies pleasantly.

"What do you mean?"

"We've still a long way to go. Come, tell me of your troubles. I shall listen."

Rose vaguely thinks that there must be a reason why she shouldn't speak to this mysterious disembodied voice, but it is the only thing which has been kind to her since her life went up in flames, and she decides she ought to take what she can get.

"Very well," Rose begins. "Today I learned that the women I thought were my aunts are not my aunts, aren't related to me, they aren't human, and they don't seem to want to have anything to do with me anymore."

"How very sad," the voice says.

"They act as though, because I am sixteen, I should suddenly know how to be a grown woman, even though they treated me as a child only yesterday. And that's putting aside the fact that they've lied to me my entire life." And although Rose still feels a bit upset about it, she finds that it isn't nearly as bad as it was only moments ago. Perhaps the sadness in her is dying now, too.

"And today I met a boy—the first person besides my aunts I've ever met in my life—and he was so kind to me, and we walked and danced and sang together all afternoon, and I thought that my life was complete… But that life is a lie. It must be destroyed, and I must become Princess Aurora."

"Well, that would make things easier, don't you think?"

"What do you mean?"

"Briar Rose must spend the next…well, who knows how long trying to decide who she is and how she feels. Princess Aurora doesn't have to do that. All she has to do is be where she is supposed to be when she is supposed to be there."

"But where is that?"

"Right here," the voice replies simply.

Briar Rose sighs, but she feels only vaguely melancholy. "I wish someone would just tell me what to do."

"Very well," says the voice. "Touch the spindle."

And indeed, there is a spinning wheel. Rose has never seen one before—all the spinning wheels in the land were burned a long time ago. She doesn't remember why. The spindle is glowing, much like the source of the voice, and it almost pulls her hand toward itself.

"But—" But Rose has pricked her finger sewing before, and she knows that it is painful. She has already experienced enough pain for one day.

"If you only touch the spindle, everything will be all right. You don't have to be Briar Rose and you don't have to be Princess Aurora. You may stay here forever and be nobody at all. Doesn't that sound nice?"

And Rose supposes it does.

"Touch it."

She does.

But everything is not all right. Everything is so much worse than before, because now she knows what it is to feel nothing, and as a drop of blood escapes from her finger, the full force of her previous pain hits her once more. She cries out in anguish and clutches blindly at shadows. The only light in the room comes from the spinning wheel.

She hates them, the good fairies who raised her and pretended to be her aunts and her protectors. She hates them! She hates her parents, the king and queen, whom she has never even seen. She hates them for giving her up and she hates them for wanting her back. She is not a thing to be passed around whenever it is convenient! She cannot spend the first part of her life as one thing and the next part as another! She is a person, and she is not Princess Aurora! _She is Briar Rose!_

Finally, her hands grasp at something which feels like the fabric of a thick cloak. She clutches it as though her life depends upon it, and she feels long, spindly arms embrace her as she slowly sinks into a heap upon the floor. "Please," she whispers, perhaps to no one. "It is too much."

"Shhh, there, there," says the owner of the cloak she is holding onto, and it is the same voice which led her here.

Princess Aurora is supposed to die today.

She is supposed to prick her finger on the spindle of a spinning wheel and die.

"Clever girl," says the voice sweetly, and Briar Rose somehow manages to look up into two glowing black eyes. "Your good fairies thought they could defy me, but it seems I've triumphed in the end, doesn't it?"

Briar Rose hoped that today her life might change. She hoped that today she would become a woman and not a child anymore, and she was absolutely certain that today the world would open up to her like a window, and that she would suddenly see and know and understand everything which had eluded her in her sixteen years of existence.

She supposes that in a way, her wish has come true, because she does understand now. She understands that it would have made no difference where she hid—if she masqueraded as a peasant in the woods or traveled to a faraway land or even if she stayed with her parents and grew up as a princess. Her entire life would always have led her here, to this moment, because it is her destiny to become the Princess Aurora.

She shakes her head sadly, "No."

The evil fairy raises one eyebrow. "No?"

"You haven't killed Princess Aurora like you wanted. You've only killed me, Briar Rose."

"You are Princess Aurora, Briar Rose," the evil fairy replies calmly.

Rose sighs, feeling strangely calm, "Soon I will be."

The evil fairy removes Rose's hands from her cloak and makes to stand up, but Rose clutches at her once more. "Wait!" she cries, all of her calm resignation gone in an instant. "I am dying. Briar Rose is dying. Please, stay with me?"

The evil fairy rolls her eyes. "I'm not going anywhere. I shall be here until you go to sleep."

It doesn't take long after that. Rose sees her life flashing before her eyes, and she finds that it is not very interesting. She understands that, too, though, for it wasn't a life that was meant to exist. She sees the time she was sick and her aunts tried everything to take care of her. She sees a few birthdays, a few holidays, a few times she broke her aunts' rules. She sees her animal friends from the forest and she sees the boy she met in the woods just this morning, and then at last she knows what it is to feel, to think, to be absolutely nothing.


	4. A Fairytale Ending

_Has anyone ever asked you to do something really difficult? And you were excited to try, but it just seemed impossible? Maybe you weren't really sure you were up to the challenge?_

Sometimes when Princess Aurora lies in bed at night, finding herself ironically unable to sleep, she tries to write a love story for herself like the ones Aunt Fauna loves to read aloud. She always has to try many times, for she finds that the story goes off track rather easily and it becomes a depressing muddle of nonsense, but the nights are long and by morning, she usually has a story she's happy with.

Once upon a time, there was a princess named Aurora. An evil fairy cast a curse on her so that she would die on her sixteenth birthday. To save her from this fate, three good fairies gave up their magic and hid her in the woods, where they raised her as a peasant girl named Briar Rose.

On the morning of her sixteenth birthday, Briar Rose fell in love with a boy she met in the woods. That evening when the three good fairies told her the truth about who she was, she was devastated that they could not be together. (For this part of the story, Aurora uses the reason her aunts thought she was upset. Every other possible reason steers her tale irrevocably off track—and she has tried them all.)

When Briar Rose returned to the castle, the evil fairy was waiting for her, and lured her into a deep slumber. As luck would have it, however, the boy she met in the woods was Prince Philip, to whom she had been betrothed since the day she was born, and he was more than happy to come to her rescue. In a fiery battle, Philip defeated the evil fairy and awoke his Princess with the kiss of true love, and they lived happily ever after.

Aurora likes the story well enough, even though it makes her queasy. Usually by the end of the night, she has to change the names in the story so that she doesn't feel like it's about her anymore.

She hates that she has to leave out her anguish, her feelings of betrayal, her meeting with the evil fairy who cursed her and how for an instant, the evil fairy was the only one making sense. She hates how she has to leave out the death of Briar Rose and the feeling that everything that happened that day seemed like destiny in the worst possible way. Her fate was unavoidable.

_Everything is as it should have been from the beginning._

Aurora doesn't see Briar Rose when she looks in the mirror anymore. Briar Rose liked to make jokes, to break rules, to think about things and to speak her mind. Princess Aurora isn't allowed to do any of those things, and really, it's much easier when she doesn't try.

She does put a lot of effort into Philip, because when she awoke from her cursed sleep to the feeling of his lips on hers, and when Aunt Flora whispered, "This is Prince Philip" and she learned that Philip and the stranger in the woods were one and the same, she wanted to be as happy as she had been before. She wanted to pretend that the last few hours hadn't happened, and she wanted to feel as though that were the best day of her life and Philip were the center of her universe again.

But just as she had very quickly become a different person—just as Briar Rose and Princess Aurora are not the same, the stranger in the woods and Prince Philip are also two very different people. The stranger in the woods fell in love with a beautiful peasant girl. He was taking a day or two off from his responsibilities as a royal. The man who was betrothed to Aurora is just as bound by his destiny as she is, and in this way, Aurora finds that the harder she tries to be in love with Philip the way Briar Rose was in love with her stranger in the woods, the more she succeeds in hating him for his role as a link in the chains of her destiny.

She especially hates that he still thinks of her as perfect. He says it all the time. "You are so perfect, my Aurora;" "Of course she can—she'll be perfect;" "Is my wife not the most perfect woman in all the land?" She hates it because it is a reminder that she can never truly be Princess Aurora, no matter how hard she tries. Princess Aurora is supposed to be perfect. She is merely a ghost of a happy peasant girl trying to be the person everyone wants her to be.

In a way, the good fairies did prepare her for this life, because they taught her never to speak to strangers. This has proved invaluable. Aurora avoids speaking as often as she can, because she is absolutely certain that if she speaks too much, Briar Rose will escape and everyone will realize that she is not who she is supposed to be.

Mostly, though, Princess Aurora succeeds in being relatively happy, if only she reminds herself not to think. As the evil fairy told her, the only thing Princess Aurora really needs to do is to be where she's supposed to be when she's supposed to be there, and Aurora has always been very good at that.

After all, if there's one thing the events of her sixteenth birthday taught her, it's that her life is not her own. It doesn't matter what she does or where she goes—she'll always end up right where someone else wants her to be.


End file.
